Started the whole world crying

All Black Ali Williams was in town recently plugging "a humorous book". My head sunk into its hands.

Every year at The Regent Book Sale I slash my way through undergrowths of sporting humorous books, filled with tales either apocryphal or belonging to someone else.

Has there ever been a worse sporting book than Hadlee's Humour?

It isn't easy thinking up jokes.

I don't even get jokes sometimes, or else I get them slowly, too slowly to make the appropriate response.

So obviously I am going to have trouble constructing my own from thin air.

But bad jokes are a different story.

Every year I make up bad jokes for Christmas crackers, which we tear open like wolves during a massive Christmas dinner where the table is so full, plates of teeming food fall off and are never missed.

But there are two kinds of bad Christmas cracker jokes.

Deliberately bad jokes, excruciating, wafer-thin and weak, are the most common.

Mine are the other kind, jokes I have tried desperately to make funny but they just came out bad.

This year I only had to intellectually feed 14. One year it was 29.

So I wrote nearly 30, thinking that as half the jokes each year are dreadful and receive only incredulous silence, then if I made up twice as many, I could take the bad ones out and be left purely with cream.

Assuming I could recognise what the bad ones were.

I test drove a few with close personal friends before they went into the crackers, and one in particular sailed hopelessly wide.

Only a woman at the university who doesn't even have her own car park laughed.

But I am stubborn, I put it in the first cracker.

If musical instruments were stored in an office, where would you keep the violins?
In a violing cabinet.

It is all in the pronunciation.

This is actually top-shelf comedy and I was surprised nearly all my close personal friends were so thick.

But there you go.

I was at least big enough to give them another chance.

What disease would you be likely to catch in an attic?
Room attic fever.

No? I had three good ones about countries.

What country has the most shark cemeteries?
Finland.

It was inevitable I would get hammered about there being no such thing as a shark cemetery.

But some people have a sense of humour, some don't.

What country takes the longest to get things done?
Queue wait.

I reckon you could give that one to Robin Williams.

One more.

What is the most dishonest country in the world?
Eeee!! Gypped!!

OK, that was a little obtuse.

Back to musical instruments.

Who is the most electric performer in an orchestra?
The conductor.

My close personal friends quite liked that one.

Less is obviously more.

What is the tastiest musical instrument?
A trumpet.

A woofter would protest that cornet is also correct, but the woofter would be wrong.

The answer is trumpet.

I could suggest adding the word boysenberry so the joke could be understood, but the reply would come back that the joke didn't make sense.

The Christmas cracker table is always populated by comedic Lilliputians.

When is the best time for a man to ride a horse?
When he is wearing jockeys.

Homophobic? No more homophobic than saying the song I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus introduces a small child to the concept of marital infidelity.

Good grief! I worked like a dog on these things since August, cut me some slack.

Oh yes, I had dog jokes too.

With musical instrument garnish.

What is a dog's favourite musical instrument?
A trom bone.

The woofters return for this one.

What on earth is a trom, they squawk.

A lesser man would answer that a trom is part of a Christmas cracker punch line, but I am not a lesser man.

I stomped out of the room.

- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

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